[HN Gopher] Multi-Account Containers Add-on on Mozilla VPN
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Multi-Account Containers Add-on on Mozilla VPN
Author : alexrustic
Score : 94 points
Date : 2022-02-01 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
| rogers18445 wrote:
| You could already do this with Mullvad. Use an extension such as
| Sideberry which allows different proxies for different
| containers. Then use Mullvad's socks5 set of endpoints.
| ersii wrote:
| It's not mentioned in their post, but Mozilla VPN is a
| brand/browser integration of Mullvad, which is excellent, so
| that's what they're using underneath the branding.
| mikece wrote:
| Multi-account containers are THE reason I cannot switch away from
| Firefox (not that I have a desire to do so). Tying in a custom
| VPN location to a container is very nice but I wish I could
| specify a different VPN provider per container. For example: to
| log into my email or MS Teams account for work connect to my
| employer's VPN; to connect to Gmail use the Mozilla VPN; to
| connect to favorite "free-range, independently sourced" videos
| website I would want yet another VPN... and TOR enabled.
|
| That said, what is so hard about Multi-account containers that
| Chromium doesn't have it?
| warent wrote:
| Except that the behavior of creating a new tab via the + button
| vs. CMD+T (in Mac) is that one of them creates a tab in the
| active container and one of them does not. This is a
| dealbreaker for me and kills the hype.
|
| https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...
| red_trumpet wrote:
| For me (Xubuntu 20.04), both behave the same: They open a new
| tab with no container (which could be considered the
| "standard container").
| eikenberry wrote:
| Check out the "Sticky Windows Container" add-on.. it makes
| the container of the left most tab the default for that
| window. It's a pretty decent way to manage multiple default
| containers.
| gigel82 wrote:
| You can use different VPN providers per-container-type; go to
| manage containers, select your container type, then click on
| Advanced proxy settings (last option); there you can input a
| proxy address.
|
| For testing, you can just type the SOCKS5 address from your VPN
| provider, but that's not very secure.
|
| In my case, I have a Pi running a few Dockers (with network
| pairs of OpenVPN/WireGuard + Socks5 proxies); it works decently
| enough, I can even use streaming services like Netflix / etc.
| if that's something you care about.
| travisporter wrote:
| Very cool! So if I assume that my ISP is recording/selling my
| browsing history, including which sites I visit, would this
| setup prevent me from being snooped on? I don't know if DNS
| goes over the socks5
| gigel82 wrote:
| SOCKS5 does not encrypt traffic, so if you put in a public
| / internet SOCKS5 server address that won't prevent
| snooping.
|
| If you have a spare Raspberry Pi (perhaps running PiHole /
| AdGuard as well which takes care of DNS security and ad-
| blocking on top), or another server running you can spin up
| a Docker (or VM/or baremetal) with an OpenVPN / WireGuard
| client and a SOCKS5 proxy.
|
| For example, in my setup I use the "dperson/openvpn-client"
| and "serjs/go-socks5-proxy" docker images (set the socks5
| container to use the network of the vpn client, and expose
| the socks5 port out of the vpn container). You should
| explore whatever option works best for your home and VPN
| setups.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| SOCKS5 does support tunneling of DNS lookups. The
| FoxyProxy addon for Firefox has that option when you
| configure it to use a SOCKS5 server.
| gigel82 wrote:
| SOCKS5, the protocol, is not encrypted. Data is sent in
| clear text across the wire and can be intercepted at any
| time.
|
| Of course, the data is just TCP and UDP packets, so you
| could be running a HTTPS connection over it (or DOH for
| DNS) but from the ISP's point of view SOCKS5 or no SOCKS5
| they can see just as much of your traffic.
|
| SOCKS5 to an external server is not solving encryption,
| you need a VPN for that; at most, it can solve anonymity
| (by hiding your IP address, presuming you trust the
| SOCKS5 server operator).
|
| In my case, I'm using SOCKS5 to another machine in my LAN
| which in turn connects to an external VPN provider over
| an encrypted channel (OpenVPN or WireGuard).
| tjoff wrote:
| That is true, however for "personal use" one of the
| popular uses of a socks proxy is to create a local socks
| server using ssh. Works on all big desktop platforms (on
| windows puttys plink.exe works fine, not sure if the
| inbuilt client has it but I'd guess it does too) and
| often with already installed tools and only need a server
| with SSH, and is encrypted.
|
| And that is far more common than having a VPN, and again,
| might not even need to install anything on the client. So
| you could quickly configure a friends laptop to ssh+socks
| inside your own network to stream from a local jellyfin
| server, or whatever. Or bypass language restrictions on
| regional services when you are abroad on vacation etc.
| (all are trivial to do with a VPN of course, but this is
| quite handy when you normally don't have a need for a VPN
| and/or just want something quick with tools and accounts
| you know at the back of your mind).
|
| https://bash-prompt.net/guides/ssh-firefox-tunnel/
| javajosh wrote:
| I suspect that account containers in Firefox has very, very low
| uptake. Why? Because it's a feature that is difficult to
| understand - it has nuance to it. Just understanding what it
| does for you requires a pretty sophisticated understanding of
| how browsers work, and how websites work. If uptake is low, it
| makes sense that Google would not prioritize the feature. As a
| happy coincidence, this also keeps the maintstream web in
| place, a relatively simpler mental model for ad tech software
| devs working on the web, where your starting point is a user
| browser capable of moving small strings between origins without
| the user's knowledge or consent.
|
| Which leads me to the idea that maybe the feature should be
| better motivated! Perhaps we can show the user a meaningful and
| well-defined number, comparing for example the sheer size of a
| normal request vs one made in a container. If necessary, you
| can dig deeper into the payload, and ask questions of the
| system like, "What are they saying about me and my activity,
| using my own browser as a communication channel?" This latter
| one could be quite fun and take community contributions, small
| code snippets that know how to parse a request and interpret
| and display the meaning to the user.
|
| This is where the imagination of a developer can be helpful, to
| basically characterize as completely as possible the patterns
| we expect to see. Because so far, that's a very low-level
| mechanism, and clearly there's more room for protocols - and
| given the nature of this problem, multiple, overlapping,
| dynamic protocols that are proprietary in nature. We can
| imagine origins that just suck everything in, doing unknown
| processing on that data, but giving us tools to measure
| aggregate engagement. The need to define an audience on
| something more than source IP becomes immediately apparent, and
| permissive 3rd party cookies have enabled a huge ecosystem to
| arise, and each persistent part of that is specialized in some
| way. But the money is in showing users ads, and showing them
| really useful ads. This means measuring the users and trying to
| anticipate their needs. We can base this on "identity" facts
| that don't vary much over time, or on "behavior" facts that
| vary a lot over time, albeit with lots of consistency for most
| of it. Both are used to predict what a user wants enough to
| spend money on. In particular, behavior, what are they asking
| about, learning about? What sorts of tools and supplies -
| things you can buy - are associated with the subject?
|
| TBH if this happened on the client side, I wouldn't find it
| creepy at all; I'd find it quite useful. There are really two
| problems with server side processing of identity and behavior:
| first, it quickly gets bigoted when people are asked to
| associate an identity with a consumer demand. Who gets to make
| this association? Are we okay with this being a self-
| reenforcing mechanism since we are pushing identities toward
| the behaviors we associate with their stereo-type? Second, it
| lets servers split the internet without our knowledge. The
| incentive to garner as much attention as possible leads
| inevitably to breaking our shared perception of the world. At
| least, back in the day, you could argue with someone over a
| book, and know you have read the same book. But now, the book
| is a screen, basically a browser, and it is very different for
| each individual, and no-one is fully aware of this truth.
|
| I'm being utterly serious when I say that these are the kinds
| of issues, technical and philosophical, that users need to be
| aware of before they can get excited about a feature like tab
| containers. Given the level of civic discourse in the wider
| world, my hope that people would be open to learning about it
| is slim to none. Heck, even most devs prefer not to think about
| it, and just make the changes the money wants to make, without
| regard to the users benefit. Then of course there is the
| secondary market for this data, law enforcement. You could
| probably get 80% of a panopticon by just hoovering Google
| analytics data for "alternative" processing. You get the rest
| by piggy-backing Cloudflare and the like. The interesting thing
| about CF and other CDNs is that they can provide an alternate,
| and unavoidable, surveillance function, since they can use
| access logs, and you cannot use the software without getting
| the bytes. This ends up being a strong argument in favor of
| content-addressable resources, rather than named resources:
| they would let a client rotate physical access, and these
| segmented logs would make it hard to recreate a coherent
| timeline. But not impossible: if enough sources cooperated, the
| could aggregate their logs and you'd lose your anonymity.
|
| No, what the world needs is not just a defensive thing like tab
| containers, but a more aggressive thing. Rather than isolate an
| account's data, why not provide all the connectivity it wants,
| but _poison the well_. Manipulate the messages sent out by your
| computer to mislead these trackers: shift identities, access
| different resources, do different things in those resources. It
| should look identical to ordinary host lookup traffic, but the
| messages will be different, noisy, worse than useless. Maybe
| call them "active defense containers".
| mikece wrote:
| > I suspect that account containers in Firefox has very, very
| low uptake. Why? Because it's a feature that is difficult to
| understand - it has nuance to it.
|
| Every time I've demonstrated containers to someone they "got
| it" right away. Some were unimpressed and didn't see how it
| would benefit them while others were blown away and ran off
| to install it on their machine, but seeing how I could log
| into the same website in different containers with different
| credentials -- without having to spawn new profile windows --
| is not that hard of a concept to grasp. Explaining the "why
| would I _want_ to? " is a different question entirely.
| javajosh wrote:
| How many users are getting 1-1 instruction on containers?
| If it's a small number, and I think it must be, then my
| point stands.
|
| Also, can I ask more about the context in which you have
| demonstrated containers? Like, why would you do that? Was
| this to friends or family or...?
| jatone wrote:
| users understand the idea, firefox just makes it hard to use
| conceptually. I see tons of everyday people using chrome's
| profiles which are effectively the same thing at the window
| level and its clear what context you're in.
|
| while firefox's concept is more powerful its also harder to
| use appropriately.
| javajosh wrote:
| I don't think users understand the idea. Partly what I
| wanted with my long post is for someone to say, "Hey, you
| don't need to understand _that_ to get account containers!
| ", but so far, nothing. I love users, but I'm under no
| illusions about the extent of their knowledge.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The problem each container takes more resources.
|
| You can wait for google to copy features. You might be
| waiting for a longtime.
| sorokod wrote:
| Lost revenue most likely.
| georgyo wrote:
| I use Firefox and don't use containers, but I have a friend who
| can't use Firefox because it doesn't have multiple profiles.
|
| Chrome can create multiple browser windows that are isolated
| from each other, making a very clear distinction of scope.
|
| Firefox has containers, chromium has profiles. They accomplish
| the same goals is sightly different ways.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Firefox does have multiple profiles.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Check out the Profiler Switcher for Firefox add-on[1].
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-
| switc...
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Firefox has both profiles and containers.
|
| However, the UX for Firefox's profiles feature is godawful.
|
| Lately though, I find I prefer not to trust the application
| to manage this and just launch separate profiles in their own
| separate app namespaces using things like firecracker,
| firejail, or similar (depending on need).
| easrng wrote:
| about:profiles isn't that bad. There's no reference to it
| in the UI though.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| It's gotten _better_ but I wouldn 't say it isn't bad. A
| big part of the problem is not having an easy way to
| access it.
|
| Similarly, -ProfileManager has existed for ages and that
| experience is also bad.
|
| If I have to go to the lengths of about:profiles or using
| the -ProfileManager or -P command-line switches, why not
| just sandbox the entire thing?
|
| It definitely needs a useability upgrade.
| jatone wrote:
| i refuse to use it given how bad the ux is. which is
| unfortunate because its a killer feature and why I can't
| recommend firefox over chrome. basic ux.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >A big part of the problem is not having an easy way to
| access it.
|
| I've never had any issues typing "about:profiles" into
| the URL bar. It even autocompletes.
| peakaboo wrote:
| about:profiles
|
| You can have as many as you want.
| satysin wrote:
| > but I have a friend who can't use Firefox because it
| doesn't have multiple profiles.
|
| Did you or your friend not even try and Google for "firefox
| profiles"? Because if you did you would have found the
| following link as the top result
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-
| create-...
|
| Profiles have been in Firefox for longer than I can remember.
| I am pretty sure longer than Chrome has _existed_.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > I am pretty sure longer than Chrome has existed.
|
| Longer than even _Firefox_ has existed. Multi-profile
| support has been there since the Netscape days.
|
| http://www.kwom.com/setup/Communicator_winC.html
| zamadatix wrote:
| Needing to go to an internal page or create a custom
| shortcut to even see the feature exists has always been the
| problem, combined with the poor profile switching UI once
| you do know it exists. In Chrome it's an inherent part of
| the browser UI and the browser not only shows it to you but
| explains to you how to use them. Remember 2/3 of Firefox
| users don't even have an extension, expecting them to just
| accept this as the answer is laughable.
|
| I've always felt Chrome was missing proper containers and
| Firefox was missing proper profiles.
| [deleted]
| ipaddr wrote:
| Just start with the -p flag
| zamadatix wrote:
| Yep, and that alone is enough for it to be too much a
| PITA to the average user. Modify a shortcut? Oh you mean
| all of them? Oh the Start Menu is customizable? Well I'm
| on a Mac. Well sometimes it doesn't work. What do you
| mean other programs can have opened Firefox and I have to
| reopen it with the right profile? I'm in the other
| profile now but the wrong stuff is there! (they didn't
| manually customize the secondary profile to be visually
| distinct). "just start with the -p flag" avoids the user
| accessibility issue with the technical answer repeated.
|
| These are obviously answered problems for anyone on HN
| but not obvious problems for the majority of users that
| have never even installed an extension (even an
| adblocker). Chrome avoids all of these by automatically
| managing the shortcuts (clearly named), providing clear
| in-browser always visible UI about multiple profiles
| (also clearly marked), and explaining to the user how to
| make/manage them in app.
|
| This is before getting into problems Chrome shares with
| Firefox like not syncing local profiles or issues with
| the way things work on Android.
| andrecarini wrote:
| Firefox's UI/UX for profiles is, unfortunately, very clunky
| and nowhere near as intuitive as Chrome's.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| Containers are plumbed throughout Gecko. It's not trivial to
| add, but it's not intractable either. Somebody has to be
| willing to put in the effort, more than anything.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Because Google doesn't want you to have privacy and avoid
| tracking. They are in the camp that wants more of it, and they
| want to control it fully on the entire world wide Web.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Ok, but where the hell are my Android extensions? It's been
| years, what possible excuse is there? Either admit you just don't
| care about extensions so I stop wasting my time, or stop wasting
| resources on pointless vanity projects and get your shit
| together. Every new random thing like this is an insult to
| longstanding users who are still wanting for the baseline
| experience they had years ago.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't fulminate on HN. This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| You may not feel that you owe deprivers of Android extensions
| better, but you owe this community better if you're
| participating in it.
| sprokolopolis wrote:
| I just use this feature and it works for most of the extensions
| that I want to use:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Still can't believe we live in a world where iOS has web
| extensions before Android does
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| Firefox for Android does support (proper) browser extensions.
| I have uBlock Origin, for example. The problem is that by
| default Mozilla only allows a small number of extensions
| since the redesign/new Firefox.
|
| There's a way to use the other extensions, but it requires FF
| nightly and our own list of extensions:
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-
| extensio...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Firefox on Android has had extensions for a while now. I'm
| using them everyday. It's just that you can't use all
| extensions on it as of now.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > It's just that you can't use all extensions on it as of
| now.
|
| This is so incredibly misleading I struggle to take it
| seriously. They had _thousands_ of add-ons on firefox and
| any remotely popular add-on had a firefox-for-android
| release. If I open Nightly right now and disable custom
| add-ons I see a woping _18_ add-ons available and this is
| _3_ years after the first release with GeckoView.
|
| They made the design decision to change to GeckoView engine
| in firefox 79.
|
| They made this decision with the awareness that it would
| break all of these add-ons. They have made a very low
| design effort in the last 3 years to resolve this.
|
| Users went went from hundreds of add-ons and stabilished
| workflows to 18 add-ons after 3 years of rolling updates.
|
| Power users won't be stopped by this, as Celso mentioned
| you can add your custom collection on AMO, but it speaks
| volumes about how much lack of focus there is in FF and the
| lack of user voice in the current design decisions.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| They did have thousands of add-ons in theory, but the
| vast majority of them didn't work or had major issues.
|
| I agree that it's an issue, but the situation really
| wasn't great beforethen either.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Or iOS extensions. All browsers should stop calling them "Web
| Extensions" if they arr never going to be available to the
| majority of the web users.
| fsflover wrote:
| > Or iOS extensions.
|
| Because Apple doesn't allow Firefox on iOS, it's just a
| Safari skin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587191.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| Since all browsers on iOS are forced to use Webkit, I don't
| see how Mozilla can add Firefox extensions to their iOS
| browser.
| anonymousab wrote:
| This seems a bit weird as containers still share history and
| other data between them. I get that they're not supposed to
| replace profiles, but this feature seems more suited to a per-
| profile basis than per-container because of said leakage. Of
| course, you can already do per-profile VPNs via split tunneling
| and a --profile specifier on startup, but it'd be nice to have a
| better UI within Firefox itself for the idea.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Another Mozilla PR piece regarding "privacy"... let me see, did
| they finally bundle (or reimplement) uBlock Origin as a standard
| feature of the browser? No. Did they make telemetry opt-in as
| required per the GDPR? No. Did they stop opening Mozilla webpages
| on first run which contain Google Analytics (also in breach of
| the GDPR)? No.
|
| Snark aside, this change (for once!) does have some benefits.
| Tracking using IP address & user-agent alone is pretty strong
| regardless of cookies/etc and can't be completely blocked client-
| side when you do need to load the requested resource (such as
| browsing the malicious website, or third-party websites using
| Google Fonts/ReCaptcha/etc), so containing these within their own
| VPN, separate from other browsing activity is an effective
| countermeasure.
| james-redwood wrote:
| They derive nearly 90% of their revenue from allowing Google to
| be the default search engine. Default uBlock is an
| impossibility. If you'd like Firefox with that feature, try the
| LibreWolf fork.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That doesn't prevent me from calling them out on their
| bullshit. You want to make money from ads? Fine, but don't go
| around shouting "PRIVACY" at every possible opportunity and
| giving people a false sense of security.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| While I agree with most of your points, I don't want Firefox to
| implement uBlock Origin.
|
| Should Firefox prioritize compatibility with it? Yes. Should
| the uBlock Origin developers have the personal cell phone of
| Mozilla's CTO? Also yes. But there's nothing to be gained from
| absorbing it, and all we'll get is more bureaucracy.
|
| If anything, I'd like Firefox to focus more on their core
| product, not less.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| My argument is that Firefox should have functionality
| equivalent to uBlock Origin by default, so that less tech-
| savvy users who install the "privacy" focused browser
| actually get some without having to browse for extra add-ons
| and potentially install an inferior or outright malicious
| option.
| echelon wrote:
| That'll cause Firefox to get blacklisted by a large number
| of websites.
|
| It doesn't take much for a website to determine that the
| Firefox user agent (or detectable fingerprint) results in
| zero advertising ROI. They'll block it outright and ask you
| to use Chrome.
|
| Then Chrome wins.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Then you pretend to be Chrome, which you should do anyway
| to defeat fingerprinting.
| echelon wrote:
| Outside of running the Chrome process itself, you can't
| defeat fingerprinting. Even headless use can be detected.
| sciurus wrote:
| > My argument is that Firefox should have functionality
| equivalent to uBlock Origin by default
|
| It largely does.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-
| prote...
| DavideNL wrote:
| Note that you can also assign containers to a specific vpn (for
| example Mullvad) with Container Proxy:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| I gave up on containers in Firefox a while ago. They didn't
| really support subdomains, which made using some services (e.g.,
| AWS) extremely painful. Any site with a different subdomain for
| the login page, the auth flow, the dashboard, etc., became
| unusable. Don't know if they ever fixed it to allow for grouping
| subdomains.
| surrTurr wrote:
| Absolutely loving FF containers & their VPN. Mozilla VPN
| integration was the reason why I gave their vpn service a try,
| and so far it's been an absolute blast. I completely forget that
| I got an VPN running in the background, that's how fast it is. I
| made containers for all of the big tech companies. With the VPN
| settings per container, Google now thinks I moved to Swizerland
| lol.
| alexrustic wrote:
| See also:
|
| _VPN by Google One comes to iOS_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30165696
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(page generated 2022-02-01 23:01 UTC)